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A review by branch_c
The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence by Carl Sagan
4.0
Sagan acknowledges at the end that "To write a book on subject so far from one's primary training is at best incautious." and it's true that a book subtitled "Speculations on the Future of Human Intelligence" might be unexpected coming from an astronomer. But Sagan was knowledgeable about science in general, which made him more qualified than most to engage in this discussion of how the mind has developed and how it works.
These speculations were written in '77, so there's certainly been further work on many of the areas mentioned. Some ideas, such as "This surely means there is a part of the brain which remembers sounds and images, but not thoughts." (p. 80) seem likely to be true in some sense, and others, such as "We may be able to engineer genes before we are able to engineer brains." (p. 213) have proven to be absolutely correct.
Sagan gets surprisingly (to me at least) philosophical for someone with a reputation as a hard scientist. After telling the story of rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard's inspiration for developing space vehicles, he asks "Can it be an accident that this vision of voyages to the planets ... was glimpsed in the limbs of a tree?" (p. 81) Well, yes, actually!
There are some other points where his insights go a bit far - for example, the speculations on the origin of the correspondence between left/right and bad/good I think make some unwarranted leaps of etymology.
But overall this is an informative and entertaining book by a master of scientific thinking and communication. Well worth picking up, even almost 40 years after it was written.
These speculations were written in '77, so there's certainly been further work on many of the areas mentioned. Some ideas, such as "This surely means there is a part of the brain which remembers sounds and images, but not thoughts." (p. 80) seem likely to be true in some sense, and others, such as "We may be able to engineer genes before we are able to engineer brains." (p. 213) have proven to be absolutely correct.
Sagan gets surprisingly (to me at least) philosophical for someone with a reputation as a hard scientist. After telling the story of rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard's inspiration for developing space vehicles, he asks "Can it be an accident that this vision of voyages to the planets ... was glimpsed in the limbs of a tree?" (p. 81) Well, yes, actually!
There are some other points where his insights go a bit far - for example, the speculations on the origin of the correspondence between left/right and bad/good I think make some unwarranted leaps of etymology.
But overall this is an informative and entertaining book by a master of scientific thinking and communication. Well worth picking up, even almost 40 years after it was written.